Unwrapping The Galaxy

Oct 30, 2009

When Rochester Institute of Technology astronomers peeled off a layer of Milky Way, it wasn't caramel and nougat that they found inside. They discovered a massive star cluster on the verge of exploding. The group of 14 red supergiants–supersized stars whose mass together is more than 20,000 times that of the sun–was discovered using infrared technology to penetrate the thick dust of the Milky Way galaxy. The discovery forces current massive star formation models back to the drawing board, and allows astronomers to construct a better snapshot of the final moments of a star's life. But there's still plenty of time to go grab a candy bar before the high-energy fallout–these stars won't explode in our lifetime.—Andrew Nusca